Two complete novels by Virginia Woolf in one book
Jacob's Room
Here within the scope of one small book is compressed the whole life of Jacob Flanders... From a very small boy he passes through the scenes of childhood and young manhood until he loses his life in the war.
Instead of constructing the story with the heroic mood in view, building up to a climax of sacrifice, we feel we are seeing it almost as Jacob Flanders might have looked at his own life. Our memories are full of moments and hours -- unheroic moments, but moments nevertheless which stand vividly etched.
The Waves
It is impossible to describe, impossible to do more than salute, the richness, the strangeness, the poetic illumination of this book. The characters are not analysed, as in a laboratory: they are entered into; intuited.
In each soliquy in this pattern of soliloquies we ourselves are at the center.
We are Bernard, we are Susan, but with this difference: that we have borrowed, for the moment, the lamp of genius, and by its light may read the secrets of our private universe.
CONDITION: USED with moderate wear